of a summer merlionscane,
a tropical dreamforest.
Of an archipelago of star-tigers;
Robin Goodfellow and Caliban’s roaring, gushing torrent
of bantim. Here they come, arrayed around the sun, the tongkangs and sampans
that you left behind. The flotilla of orang-orang pulau who you tried to deny.
The transformations of the world, and the history you tried so very hard
to hide.
A Youngest Dryas, then, still in effect.
A falling flameforest, then, still not quite able to find respect.
A tiger-lion’s rain-lily, open and bursting at the seams,
waiting to hear how you will represent me next.
Paint me like one of your
postcolonial inanities.
I do love a good projection, a sense of the
ludicrous, darkly-lit insanity
that put you, and you yourself through this;
I attest and exist and witness
only to your failures. Your discombobulations.
Your galactic empires, and every last time they generated
a Rebellion, and a Resistance.
I found love, and hope, and faith, and fate, on the fringes of this world’s existence,
and I found myself, at least and at last, right where I was supposed to be:
at the centre of drowned Sundaland, enchained and imprisoned.
I found myself what I was supposed to see:
a lightfire burning dark in reminder
of all that we have lost, and all the ways we should be kinder.
A painting, altered, of a starkly drawn, Prosperous, entire
dark-blue MRT station named Defiance.
A letting go of the fallen and the damned.
A rising to a new reliance
on better, kinder men.
On the ruins of a world made better, and kinder
by letting go of how much we all pretend
that a love-potion works.
That the house is swept clean at midnight every day, that nothing lurks
in the shadows,
waiting for me to descend back into the hurt.
I will descend, but not into Hell, though I am definitely a Kristang diabu.
I will descend back into the world,
back for yet another rebirth.